Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I’m in Sydney. It takes 20 hours on planes to get here from Boston,
many more if you fold in the waits and to and fro from airports.

If that doesn’t make it perfectly clear that this is almost
another planet a visit to the botanical garden will. White parrots
with yellow horns pick at the grass in flocks. Fig trees the size of
althletic fields. Some trees with 70% of their mass dedicated to
their trunk; some like bottles and others like cones. The trees are
tough here. The axes of the settlers would break when they attempted
remove them.

The most stricking though are the flying foxes. They rest like
wasp nests in the high branches of trees; five hundred or a thousand
of them. Occationally one comes or goes. The size of a large hawk
but with a sound like a large canvas of leather, a huge bat.
Occationally a vast number of them take the air in flock; very
biblical.

Against that ecological background it is odd how very much like
London Sydney is. Herds of business men in identical color, black.
Subways with tiles and signage right out of the 19th century. Largen
department stores, with men in tuxs playing pianos at the base of the
elevator wells, entire floors of shoes, ladies hats that remind me of
Easter sunday in the early 1960s outragous piles of feathers.

Very good wine.

Beep - A cure for hickups; well it worked for me.

“Believing that Lisp circa 1982 plus some mid-1980s ML tricks thrown in is better than all of the new programming tools (C#, Java) that have been built since then is sort of like being a Holocaust denier.”

This reports that dumb flies out perform smart flies (from New Scientist 24/Sept/03).

The quick summary. Breed up a population of smart fruit flies. Insert smart flies into general population. Make food scarce. Smart flies don’t do so well. What’s smart? Smart was defined as 1) the skill to taste a poison, and 2) the skill to avoid laying your eggs in and around that poison. Why didn’t they do so well? “They are slower at feeding.”

Do with it what you will.

Different environments reward different portfolios of skills. I assume that evolution has found a way to keep the library of skills highly diverse so that as the environments shift from one generation to the next a species can survive.

For example lets say that the environment rewards risk taking (i.e. the environment is rich and full of opportunities). For a few generations the risk takers thrive. Suddenly the environment shifts so that the careful and risk adverse win. If a species evolves too quickly to fit the first environment it’s going to be in big trouble when the environment shifts.

In Jane Jacob’s book “A Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle of Sovereignty” she suggests that Toronto succeeded Montreal as the #1 city of Canada because Montreal’s entrepenures were more cautious; a strategy that had served them well for a century but a strategy that turned out to be inappropriate during the boom years following the second world war. I feel that something similar happened between Rt. 128 in Massachusetts and Silicon Valley in high tech during the last 25 years.

I remain hopeful that we are in the last generation that rewards people who can spell.

Two moral frames works. Commercial and Guardian. From Jane Jacob’s book Systems of Survival.

Moral Syndrome: Commercial

• Shun force
• Come to voluntary agreements
• Be honest
• Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens
• Compete
• Respect contracts
• Use initiative and enterprise
• Be open to inventiveness and novelty
• Be efficient
• Promote comfort and convenience
• Dissent for the sake of the task
• Invest for productive purposes
• Be industrious
• Be thrifty
• Be optimistic

Moral Syndrome: Guardian

• Shun trading
• Exert prowess
• Be obedient and disciplined
• Adhere to tradition
• Respect hierarchy
• Be loyal
• Take vengeance
• Deceive for the sake of the task
• Make rich use of leisure
• Be ostentatious
• Dispense largesse
• Be exclusive
• Show fortitude
• Be fatalistic
• Treasure honor

This dialectic is more prevalent than you’d expect. For example in building web systems I find that the folks attempting to build the business tend to be in the first camp while the people running the data center tend to be in the second camp. Both syndromes have their place. While an individual might prefer one to another it’s valuable to appreciate that there are situations where the other one is more optimal.

Where you get into all kinds of ethical problems is designing custom syndromes consisting of half of one list and half of the other. But then, it is where the interesting work is to be done.

If you look at Verisign’s recent offensive actions thru these lenses it’s hard to see a way that what they did was ethical from the point of view of either syndrome.

This book has grown on me over the years.